– Roff, Jeffery. “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread.” Visual Anthropology Review, 14, no.1 (Spring/Summer 1998), 45-57. Also available at
- Documentary is supposed to be a serious, even educational, genre. It prompts sincere readings. Still today many critics take Land Without Breadat face-value, seeing it as a straightforward work of social-issue documentary. The American Anthropological Association guidebook, Films for Anthropological Teaching, describes it as “a social and anthropological document on the unique district of Las Hurdes near the Portuguese border of Spain” (Heider and Hermer 1995: 153). When I referred to the film as a “black comedy” on an electronic bulletin board devoted to visual communication, I received a number of testy replies from anthropologists and filmmakers who had always taken the work as, in the words of one of them, “a serious, but flawed documentary.”
– # Rony, Fatimah Tobing. “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North.” The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, Duke University Press, 1996, 99-126
- Nanook of the North – considered by many to be one of the great works of art of independent cinema
- Nanook – an artifact of popular culture
- What the film and the discourse surrounding it can tell us about the nature of anthropological knowledge and the role of visual media in legitimating that knowledge and other regimes of truth
- Taxidermic display
- Nanook seen as a film without a scripted narrative
- Taxidermy seeks to make that which is dead look as if it were still living
- The ethnographic is without intellect: he or she is best represented as merely existing. It is the camera of the explorer who will capture the reality of the ‘simply lived’ lives
- First example of participatory cinema – they did not put much stock in the value of using ethnographic film for mere empirical documentation
- The authenticity of this sort of documentary ultimately depends entirely on the honesty of the director
- Nanook is an art film – the perfect relationship between filmmaker and subject, the “innocent eye”, a search for realism that was not just inscription, but which made the dead look alive and the living look dead.
